L'immaginazione, spronata dalla fantasia, tende a realizzare un antico sogno dell'uomo: i viaggi nel tempo. Gli stimoli proposti dalla Storia, specialmente per situazioni e fatti che vanno riducendosi a mera cronaca con il rischio di svuotarli della loro importanza, spingono a valutare situazioni con un diverso svolgimento e le conseguenze che avrebbero potuto comportare alla società contemporanea. Per una precisa scelta, ho evitato di considerare fatti troppo recenti preferendo limitare il viaggio al tempo di uno degli ultimi eroi moderni, riferimento per ogni persona perbene.
A premier singer and master teacher here tells other singers how to get the most from 151 famous arias selected for their popularity or their greatness from 66 operas, ranging in time and style from Christopher Gluck to Carlisle Floyd, from Mozart to Menotti. “The most memorable thrills in an opera singer's life,” according to the author's Introduction, “may easily derive from the great arias in his or her repertoire.” This book continues the work Martial Singher has done, in performances, in concerts, and in master classes and lessons, by drawing attention “not only to precise features of text, notes, and markings but also to psychological motivations and emotional impulses, to laughter and tears, to technical skills, to strokes of genius, and even here and there to variations from the original works that have proved to be fortunate.” For each aria, the author gives the dramatic and musical context, advice about interpretation, and the lyric—with the original language (if it is not English) and an idiomatic American English translation, in parallel columns. The major operatic traditions—French, German, Italian, Russian, and American—are represented, as are the major voice types—soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone, bass-baritone, and bass. The dramatic context is not a mere summary of the plot but is a penetrating and often witty personality sketch of an operatic character in the midst of a situation. The musical context is presented with the dramatic situation in a cleverly integrated way. Suggestions about interpretation, often illustrated with musical notation and phonetic symbols, are interspersed among the author's explication of the music and the action. An overview of Martial Singher’s approach—based on fifty years of experience on stage in a hundred roles and in class at four leading conservatories—is presented in his Introduction. As the reader approaches each opera discussed in this book, he or she experiences the feeling of participation in a rehearsal on stage under an urbane though demanding coach and director. The Interpretive Guide will be of value to professional singers as a source of reference or renewed inspiration and a memory refresher, to coaches for checking and broadening personal impressions, to young singers and students for learning, to teachers who have enjoyed less than a half century of experience, and to opera broadcast listeners and telecast viewers who want to understand what goes into the sounds and sights that delight them.
Included in these eighteen essays by Cone are his never-before-published essay, "The World of Opera and Its Inhabitants," the unabridged version of "Music: A View from Delft," an introduction to this collection by the author himself, and a complete bibliography of his published writings. "This selection of [Cone's] writings includes all the most incandescent and influential articles. We should have had such a book long ago."—Joseph Kerman, University of California at Berkeley Winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for 1990
Martin Katz puts his long career as partner to celebrated soloists to good use in order to provide the knowledge and tools for any pianist to accompany beautifully. Every subject relating to collaboration is discussed, with recorded examples by the author to serve as audible demonstrations of his ideas. For the interested beginner as well as the working professional, everything to promote artistic and practical collaboration is here.
Berton Coffin, "creator of The Singer's Repertoire," considers this volume to be Volume VIII of the set and explains that "Mr. Shoep has concentrated on the Italian opera repertoire, and Mr. Harris has concentrated on the Italian song repertoire."--Preface, p. viii.
This classic text, first published in 1972, has withstood the test of time as a teaching aid for English-speaking singers, teachers, coaches, and accompanists, in order that their art may be more communicative to the public. These word-by-word translations of songs and arias allow the artist to properly interpret and express the feelings and emotions that the words require at the proper time.
Conductors John Yaffé and David Daniels have created a one-stop sourcebook for orchestras, opera companies, conductors, and librarians who research and/or prepare programs of vocal excerpts—such as solos, ensembles, and choruses—for concert performance. In this book, readers will find detailed information on a vast repertoire of vocal pieces commonly extracted from operas, operettas, musicals, and oratorios—more than 1,750 excerpts from 450 parent works. Modeled on Daniels’ Orchestral Music, Arias, Ensembles, & Choruses includes basic historical details about each parent work as well as extract titles, subtitles, voice types, keys, durations, locations in the original work (with page numbers in both full scores and piano-vocal scores), and exact instrumentation. It also lists the publishers that make available the orchestral materials for just the excerpt being programmed, independent of the full parent work. Until now, conductors and orchestra librarians commonly had to first leaf through full scores, searching for one elusive three-minute aria after another, only to then consult multiple publishers' catalogues to compile crucial information on all the excerpts proposed for a concert or recording. This book constitutes a single source for finding that information. In many cases, the individual entries include valuable insider information on common performance practice, including start- and stop-points, transpositions, and conventional cuts. Searching for repertoire is made easy with the detailed title index and appendixes devoted to ensemble excerpts, all categorized by personnel (e.g., duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, choruses) and language (Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian). This book is the ideal tool for the working conductor and orchestral librarian, as well as music program directors at colleges and conservatories, opera companies, and symphony orchestras. As of October 2015, a new printing of this book has occurred to correct errors in the index. A PDF version of the new index is available to previous purchasers of the volume. Please contact Rowman & Littlefield's music editor for assistance.
(Amadeus). This is the first collection of writings that deal with the life and career of the great American baritone, Lawrence Tibbett. In the articles and interviews selected for inclusion in this volume Tibbett writes about his artistic concerns: voice production, singing and acting on stage and in film, operatic teamwork, opera and the movies, modern music, and a variety of related topics.
A tribute to thirty renowned operas shares the plots and theatrical backgrounds of each, in a volume that covers such productions as Figaro and Turandot.
